Project Management, Software, Training...

Down the Tubes - 10 reasons to be concerned about pipes

The Yahoo Pipes site is flush with geeks trying to check it out, and is currently closed "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!" says the site with an oblique reference to the bloglines plumber. however, being closed has never been a barrier to speculation, so here goes.

The capabilities of Pipes (being able to easily grab, filter, sort and generally tie a bunch of stuff together) will boost the importance of RSS. No new site should be built without taking it into consideration

The ability of end-users to work with RSS data in a powerful but fairly simple (I think it is still arcane for a vast majority of computer users) will lead to some interesting and probably valuable services.

The same lowering of the technological bar will create a new generation of SPLOGs (Spam blogs)

The same lowering of the technological bar will create simple mis-uses of other people's content. This will be difficult to sort out. The point here and above isn't that this is something new, but that it will become easier to do and thus more people will do it.

There is nothing better to talk about since the Astronaut jokes have run their course.

Pipes, like Unix pipes, or Grep or any other command line tool are acquired tastes and as such will be the domain of a fairly small percentage of users. They are quite important to developers though.

Publishers (even people like me who are giving their content away) need to be concerned about how their data is being used. This gives rise to the need for a way to track-down what you have published so you know where it is ending up. Without this sort of feedback it is hard to improve. Perhaps some embedded ID that can be passed along with the feed would help with this. Sure sploggers can strip it out, but everyone else should be happy to pass it along as better content is better for everyone.

I forget what 8 was for.

Trusting the source may get harder. When things are mashed, it is harder to tell what is giving off the bad smell. The embedded ID would be a method to help determine TRUST.